It's a feature of the dependency system and speed of change of that ecosystem. A large number of systems have been written with these 'high maintenance' stacks

It's a feature of the dependency system and speed of change of that ecosystem. A large number of systems have been written with these 'high maintenance' stacks in recent years. I agree the users of these stacks are often short sighted and you could call that bad engineering. However it's very much a feature of those platforms, not so much individuals decisions on then. Personally I prefer ecosystems with large common libraries that are highly stable and cohesive to avoid those problems .. but the reality is so much software is built in fragile/high maintenance stacks these days, npm and react being the worst bit not only examples of extreme code rot from time decay of the ecosystem. Try updating a react app from two years ago to really understand..